Thomas Murphy

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Thomas E. Murphy
Research Director
4 years at Gartner
27 years IT industry

Thomas Murphy is a research director with Gartner, where he is part of the Application Strategies and Governance group. Mr. Murphy has more than 25 years of experience in IT as a developer, product manager, technical editor and industry analyst. Read Full Bio

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Software Quality Gains Industry Standards Exposure

by Thomas Murphy  |  December 14, 2009  |  4 Comments

Software quality is often relegated to a time-boxed bug-hunt carried out by either over-taxed or under-skilled employees. This is a major contributing factor to the high cost of software maintenance in most organizations.
A leading challenge for QA teams  is the lack of accepted terminology and standards.  The ISO has a software quality standard (ISO 9126) but this has little market recognition or industry tools support.  This week, the OMG (http://www.omg.org) is announcing the formation of the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) which combines the OMG with the SEI with Dr. Bill Curtis (co-author of CMM) as Director and Capers Jones as Distinguished Advisor. The challenge will be driving relevance and getting participation from the leading testing tool vendors (in particular HP and IBM) but it is good to see more focus being paid to driving software quality and the value of quality to the business.

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4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Bob Bartlett   December 15, 2009 at 11:52 am

    This sounds like a good initiative, but I am intrigued by the comment regarding participation from test tool tendors. Test tools do not make quality software. At best test tools help find defects more efficiently. Even fixing the defects still does not necessarily make quality software.

  • 2 Thomas   December 15, 2009 at 2:17 pm

    This is true and too often we take a “test in quality” approach. However, I know that both IBM and HP want to play in the life-cycle and drive improved process automation. Tools enable and vendors help evangelize the message.

  • 3 Jitendra   December 18, 2009 at 7:49 pm

    Tom and Bob — I couldn’t agree more. Great post!

    Application Software Quality is more than high availability and low latency. It includes the speed with which the application can be modified to meet a pressing business need, and the inherent strength of the software to repel security attacks. Application Software Quality goes beyond present-day performance to include a measure of future performance — how well an application meets future business needs.

  • 4 simi   January 2, 2010 at 11:03 am

    Hi,

    This Software Testing artical is very useful for me. I am a QA Engineer and always

    looking to learn something new. I would like to introduce another good Software Testing

    blog, Have a look.

    http://SoftwareTestingNet.com

    simi

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